City of St. Pete launches Big Data tool: St. Pete Stat

In February, the National Council of Mayors honored St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman as Best Mayor for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. On the very same day, Kriseman presented a concept called St. Pete Stat at the Greenhouse‘s weekly 1 Million Cups event for start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Still in its infancy, the concept – as introduced by Kriseman and St. Pete Stat coordinator Debbie Volk – allows the public to interact with live data, through graphs, maps and charts, in exploration of the city’s departments and specific work projects.

Today, four months later, Stat has launched.

Most common code violations. (Screenshot from Stat)

New York City began the open data phenomena, piloting its use with law enforcement data. As  Kriseman explained, all great mayors “steal and scale,” taking great ideas from other cities and scaling them up or down for their own city’s needs. Full government departmental data transparency was Martin O’Malley’s brainchild in Baltimore – where Kriseman first saw how powerful this kind of transparency could be. Kriseman has been fascinated by the concept ever since and hired Volk, well versed in program evaluation, to coordinate the project.

The two main ideas behind Stat are accessibility and accountability. The collection of data is nothing new. The City of St. Pete is packed to the gills with data from every department – but much of it was confusingly dictated, fragmented, and unused by any of the departments.

Stat is the product of taking the abundance of city data, paring it down and telling each department’s story. It should make department data not only accessible to the department itself, but to other departments who need it, as well as the public. The open source format cuts the red tape associated with interdepartmental communications and public records requests.

New construction stats from Construction Services and Permitting (screenshot from Stat)

In order to start making sense of the data – to start crafting it into story form – Volk first needed to know what the departments were most concerned about. Volk started with the Public Works department, interviewing key players to learn what data and what analyses would be most helpful to them, to tell their story, their successes and their challenges.

The first phase of St. Pete Stat is just getting everyone on the same page, Volk said. “We want to get to the single source of truth,” she explained, “where everyone in the department has the same answer because they’re pulling from the same data.” Departments like Public Works, Licensing and Permitting and a number of others have regional and national standards by which their work can be judged, but when no one’s sure where current performance stands, goal-setting proves difficult.

Active Code Cases from Code Department (screenshot from Stat)

According to Kriseman, Stat is the first step to changing that. Finding the “single source of truth” allows departments to measure where they are, set goals and meet them or understand why they’re not meeting them.

In many departments where evaluations only happen once or twice a year, Stat will be an integral tool for new quarterly evaluations. 

As for the end-user experience? Stat is filled with possibilities.

Interested in seeing where new construction has been built in the last year? There’s a map for that. Building permits throughout the city? A map for that too. Neighborhood code violations? The little green dots nearly blot out the map.

Progress on the road work in your neighborhood? The New St. Pete Pier? Albert Whitted Airport? It’s all in Stat. Check it out, this is what big data should look like.